The Differentiated Countryside

DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism: Classic Texts

No single event played a greater role in the birth of modern environmentalism than the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and its assault on insecticides. The documents collected by Thomas Dunlap trace shifting attitudes toward DDT and pesticides in general through a variety of sources: excerpts from scientific studies and government reports, advertisements from industry journals, articles from popular magazines, and the famous "Fable for Tomorrow" from Silent Spring. Beginning with attitudes toward nature at the turn of the twentieth century, the book moves through the use and early regulation of pesticides; the introduction and early success of DDT; the discovery of its environmental effects; and the uproar over Silent Spring. It ends with recent debates about DDT as a potential solution to malaria in Africa.

Larry Gonick

Cartoon Guide to the Environment

Do you think that the Ozone Hole is a grunge rock club? Or that the Food Web is an on-line restaurant guide? Or that the Green Revolution happened in Greenland? Then you need The Cartoon Guide to the Environment to put you on the road to environmental literacy. The Cartoon Guide to the Environment covers the main topics of environmental science: chemical cycles, life communities, food webs, agriculture, human population growth, sources of energy and raw materials, waste disposal and recycling, cities, pollution, deforestation, ozone depletion, and global warming--and puts them in the context of ecology, with discussions of population dynamics, thermodynamics, and the behavior of complex systems.

Alun Anderson

After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic

Global warming is changing the Arctic faster and more dramatically than any place else on Earth. "After the Ice" presents the winners and losers in this high stakes battle, from nations and native peoples to animals and the very landscape itself.